Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/36

 poets of Bengal, Chandidas and Vidypati: but his full birth as an original poet began about the age of eighteen. Nature then took stronger hold on him, and the outcome is to be seen in his early songs which are to be found in the two series, and  ("Songs of Sunrise" and "Songs of Sunset"). Their character, highly idealistic and subjective, moody or fanciful, may be gathered from the criticism of Dr. Seal:

"Along with the waxing and waning light, the rising or setting sun," he writes, "come floating to the poet's soul aerial phantasms and drowsy enchantments, memories of days of fancy and fire, ghostly visitings and flashes of Maenad-like inspiration, which the poet seizes in many a page of delicate silver-lined introspection or imaginative verse. In these songs Bengali poetry rises to the height of neoromanticism."

The very titles of the "Evening Songs" unmistakably define their note of foreboding and the young poet's melancholy,—"Despair in Hope," "Suicide of a Star," "Invocation to Sorrow," "The Woman without a Heart," "Heart's Monody." According to the same friendly critic, the intense egoism and subjective